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Wednesday, May 2, 2012

More Dog Issues...

Okay,so this week the plan was two fold; 1) get back into my weekly workout routine after taking two weeks off to decide if I was going to decide whether I was going to continue with the running thing and do a 10K and 2) Get a 22 mile week in for Maggie..yes 22 .. that has a fail safe built in because if I didn't make 22, 20 would still be "OK"..

So I have decided that the running thing is done for now, exept for maybe a little trail running just to mix it up. Otherwise, my fitness routine for the summer months will go back to interval workouts twice a week and a day of weights, and the rest will be farm and garden work. So far this week, I got one workout in.. Tonight is another workout night.. we will have to see what happens because after last night, things have the potential to be totally screwed up for the remaining week or what's left of it. Maggie getting in those 20 miles is likely out of the question...

The German Shepherd, Xena, has gone off the deep end. Last Monday she ran away. She managed to scale the 6 foot kennel and high tailed it to god knows where. Tom looked for 3 hours for her. Luckily, she came home, on her own, once I showed up... after traveling like a banshee to get through a 4 hour drive just to get home from a day of CMS auditors... I made it home in 2.5 hours.. record time , but as soon as I got home, Xena showed up when I called her. It turns out , she is deathly afraid of lawn equipment. The neighbor had been mowing and it sent her over the top of the kennel. Ok, so plan B was to put wire of some sort on top of the Kennel.

I am doing this post in reverse so bear with me. I am working on about 4 hours of sleep for the past two nights.

Reverse the clock to Sunday. Xena developed diarrhea. It hasn't stopped, even though I have tried to feed her rice and taken her off everything else.. Sunday night, in an effort to try to keep her "contained" I put her in the mud room and shut the bottom half of the Dutch door that accesses the kitchen. I walked away for just a minute to find something, and she climbed over the door. After clearing a 6 foot fence, a 3.5 foot door was nothing I guess. Well, I scolded her and then she was anxious all night. Would NOT settle down. The diarhea continued but seemed to get better over night.

Monday morning: Work day..
So, since there is still no top on the outdoor kennel, so we can't leave her out there... so I have been keeping her in the garage and come home at lunch to let her out. I got home finding the expected accident (s) on the floor , which wasn't a big deal, however, I also found that she had climbed up onto the new kitchen farm table that Tom built for me. He just brought it home Saturday morning and it is not quite finished . It's really a work of art and it WAS ready for it's first coat of sealer.
Yeah, well, she scratched it to hell. I wanted to kill her...I really did... Why would she climb on top of the table??? Seems the Kennel escape has set her into a tail spin of sorts. I cleaned up the mess, covered the tale, put a bunch of obstacles on top of the table to deter her from climbing up there again, and left back to work.

The good news is that when I got home last night, she had not climbed on it again and the scratches were salvageable with an iron and wet cloth (wood trade secret I guess).
Last night, we put chicken wire and boards on the top of the kennel. Once that was done, the weather broke and the lawn really needed to be mowed.

Fine, Opportunity for counter conditioning moment with the mower. I kept Xena on a leash and walked her up to it , let her sniff it before it got started and made it a big deal when she went up to it. Told her she was a good girl and rubbed her belly. She seemed okay with it at that point. Then when Tom started it, we stayed at what seemed like a safe distance away. We were in the back yard and the mower was in the front yard. She could hear it and see it but it was well away to what seeme like a "safe" distance. I tried to distract her with a toy while the mowing was going on , hoping that she would cue off me not being worried about it.. No go.. she just wanted to run away. She got really scared so I finally just brought her in the house and put her in her inside crate. She finally calmed down.

Ofcourse, with the diaharea, I had to keep taking her out every half hour so I had to keep exposing her to the noise of the "death machine" over and over. . At about 7:00 p.m I noticed that the small amount of stool she was still passing at that point (not much in her stomach) had blood in it. I thought, Uh Oh...Even with all this, she doesn't seem to act sick in any way, other than she has mentally gone off the rocker...

So, this morning, as soon as it hits 8:00 a.m, I am headed to the vet with her... which will be a whole new trauma for her... she has fear aggression with strangers...

Not sure where this disaster of a dog story is going to end at this point but what I do know is that having a dog should not cause me this much stress...